College students find love, dating disasters on Tinder dating app

Who knows … one day you could be taking an “usie” with the same phone you found your partner on through Tinder.

When you have to call your best friend to develop an escape plan as soon as your date goes to the bathroom, you know it’s not a good match. Even if Tinder, a popular dating app, disagrees.

Ashley Fields, a freshman at Indiana University, landed in that exact situation after agreeing to meet one of her Tinder matches.

“It just kept getting more awkward as the night went on…he was so different in person,” says Fields, whose best friend conveniently called her with an “emergency” so she could escape her Tinder disaster.

But let’s take a step back from this not-so-happy ending. How could a dating app end up creating such a bad match?

Tinder syncs with your Facebook and lets you “like” or “dislike” other users based on their profiles. If they like you back, it’s a match, which allows you to message each other. But if you like someone and they don’t like you back, you are not notified. The app doesn’t notify you of rejection, only praise.

“It’s definitely a huge ego boost,” Fields says. Although she used the app daily when she first downloaded Tinder, Fields deleted it after her awkward date.

Photo via Twitter

Official Tinder Twitter photo.

But not every Tinder match ends in a date disaster story for college students. Fifty percent of Tinder users are 18 to 24. Among these young users is Amanda Fallon, a recent graduate of the University of Southern California who has been dating someone she met on Tinder for the past five months.

“He seemed different to me than other guys on there. He seemed real and he was actually interested in talking to me,” Fallon says.

Fallon’s Tinder match came to see her perform with her a cappella group just two weeks after the pair met. They have been seeing each other ever since.

Fallon feels the app helped her form relationships during her transition into adulthood.

“It’s hard to meet people when you first graduate… in normal life, we stick with who we know and it’s hard to meet anyone new. That’s why Tinder is so exciting for me.”

The app’s popularity among young adults is no surprise to Tinder CEO Sean Rad, since he originally marketed the app toward college students.

“We felt we were solving a core human issue, and the truest test of that was if Tinder could give value to people in a very social environment like a college, because then we knew we could be of value to everybody,” Rad says.

Rad and co-founder Justin Mateen both attended the University of Southern California and their college experiences unveiled the need for an easier way to connect students with one another.

Since Tinder was created to help people form relationships, the hookup stigma associated with the app wasn’t exactly what Tinder’s creators had in mind.

“Tinder was never intended to be a hookup app. Less than 8% of our users think of it as such. We get emails daily of people getting engaged who met on Tinder,” Mateen says.

Users like Fallon who have had success with the app tend to agree.

“[People are] afraid to let it be more than a hookup app because it’s safer to say ‘we hooked up and nothing came from it’ than to realize you went on a couple dates with someone and the guy stopped talking to you.”

Rad hopes to see a future where students see someone they’d like to meet and they immediately take out their phones to find the person on Tinder. Considering the 6 million matches created on Tinder per day, according to Mateen, that future doesn’t seem too far from reality.

“Rather than finding someone in your classroom, you’re meeting people on Tinder and meeting up with them offline. Meeting someone on Tinder is like meeting them in real life because our phones have become an extension of who we are,” Mateen says.

Unfortunately for Fields, her recent match resulted in Tinder turmoil. But for the millions of new users engaging in the Tinder takeover every day, true love may be just a match away.

“I was his first and last Tinder date. I’m excited to see where this goes. I forget we even met on Tinder.”